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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27557905">Sing, My Little Bird</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalcia/pseuds/kalcia'>kalcia</a>, <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laeoukka/pseuds/Laeoukka'>Laeoukka</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Angst, Animal Transformation, Blood, Dark, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dubious Consent, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Unreliable Narrator</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 19:01:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,448</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27557905</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalcia/pseuds/kalcia, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laeoukka/pseuds/Laeoukka</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Newly betrothed, she flits along the path, unburdened and innocent, trusting in the surety of her step and the steady hands of her lover to catch her should she falter. Neither strength has failed her yet, this innocent child of the summer who bestows smiles and kindnesses without restraint. She carries no fear into the wood, unaware of what teeth it possesses. In her wake is Inuyasha, hair aglow as moonlight on the silver heather; like any wild thing, his weapons are tooth and claw, ferocity sheathed in civilized velvet.</p><p>But for her, he is all tenderness and accord, as much as he is able. Can hardly believe she is his. In each smile he offers her, hesitantly, lies his beating heart. In each answering blush—ripe, polished apples—is the promise of a harvest yet to come. Their only secrets are the kinds any virgin lovers hold: fragments of unfulfilled desire, cradled and concealed, potent as plum wine.</p><p>An Inuyasha homage to Angela Carter's "The Erl-King."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha, InuYasha/Kikyou (InuYasha)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Angela Carter - Inuyasha Fanworks Collection</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Sing, My Little Bird</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello everyone! I hope you're all staying safe and treating yourselves with kindness and compassion. Here is my entry for the AC Inuyasha collection of stories based on Angela Carter's "The Bloody Chamber" (1979). </p><p>Angela Carter (note: most of this is drawn from Wiki, apologies) was a British writer known for her feminist magical realism. "The Bloody Chamber" is her anthology of 10 folk/fairy tale retellings, and for this IY collaboration several writers and artists each picked a story(ies) to explore. This is my version of "The Erl-King." </p><p>I wasn't able to find much on the foundational story itself, but while reading Carter's take I was instantly reminded of a Grimm's story from my childhood, "Jorinda and Joringel," and elected to combine elements from the two. Suffice to say, although I tried to keep Carter's lush, lyrical (and often subjective!) prose in mind, I have taken liberties with both texts. </p><p>This story was a challenge for me both in terms of tone (it's dark, dark, dark-PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THE TAGS BEFORE READING; if you read it and think I've missed something, absolutely let me know) and topic. But I had a great time with it, and hope you enjoy. </p><p>Thank you SO MUCH to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalcia/pseuds/kalcia">@kalcia</a> for the AMAZING ARTWORK, seriously you blew me away, and to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fawn_Eyed_Girl/pseuds/Fawn_Eyed_Girl">@Fawn_Eyed_Girl</a> and <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeutronStarChild/pseuds/NeutronStarChildl">@NeutronStarChild</a> for convincing me to do this, Neutron for the gorgeous tumblr banner, Gribedli for being an amazing cheerleader, and everyone else involved.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>It is a day of perpetual twilight when Inuyasha and Kagome walk into the wood. </p><p>The late of autumn has fallen on the little village. While the occasional persimmon still clings to the emaciated branches of its tree, most of what hasn’t already been harvested and dried has rotted on its stem; engorged fruits have split their skins, then blackened, pulp sloughing from its shell to join the loam of rain-slick leaves. The air smells like badly fermented wine.</p><p>The dome of the sky hangs low, promising yet more rain. A wan half-light casts sickly shadows, the lee of each trunk is the purple of a darkening bruise. Wind rattles the grasping tips of branches. Half-starved creatures skitter in the undergrowth while ill-fated corvids—six, for crying—massed above. It is not yet winter, but the memory of summer has since moldered away, and the birds and beasts know it is the chill of winter that has nipped on their heels; they have better memories than people.</p><p>Kagome is the loveliest thing in the wood. </p><p>Newly betrothed, she flits along the path, unburdened and innocent, trusting in the surety of her step and the steady hands of her lover to catch her should she falter. Neither strength has failed her yet, this innocent child of the summer who bestows smiles and kindnesses without restraint. She carries no fear into the wood, unaware of what teeth it possesses. In her wake is Inuyasha, hair aglow as moonlight on the silver heather; like any wild thing, his weapons are tooth and claw, ferocity sheathed in civilized velvet.</p><p>But for her, he is all tenderness and accord, as much as he is able. Can hardly believe she is his. In each smile he offers her, hesitantly, lies his beating heart. In each answering blush—ripe, polished apples—is the promise of a harvest yet to come. Their only secrets are the kinds any virgin lovers hold: fragments of unfulfilled desire, cradled and concealed, potent as plum wine.</p><p>Soon, once they are wed, Inuyasha will gently lay her down and reveal her quivering frame, pale as fresh-fallen snow, and he will place a tender hand—here, her flank, her throat—and find himself home. She will lose herself in his sun-bright eyes: a willing, impertinent loss, a severance of the child she had been. </p><p>But for now, they are young, and in love, and the wood is just a wood on the ragged seam of the season. They have gone to pick at its threads—pluck the last of the autumn fruits; unearth the fungi from the moist, secret roots of trees with their bare hands; smell the lingering fragrance of the loquat bloom, that strange cold-weather flower. </p><p>First lost in each other’s company, Kagome and Inuyasha are then simply lost. The path of well-trampled earth no longer unspools before them. Unbidden, the forest has swallowed them up, as a wide-eyed doe eats its newborn litter, returning them to the fold. Now looming before them: a <em> goshinboku</em>, wider than five men stretching out their arms, for all it lacks a sacred rope. Unmarked sentinel of the forest, a thousand dispassionate eyes in its whorls of bark.</p><p><em> We should stay</em>, says Kagome, leaping atop a jagged stump to peer into the ragged, cross stitch branches. <em> We should go</em>, counters Inuyasha, turning round to scent their pathway home. So only the goshinboku sees the curious twist that passes, lightly, over Kagome’s face. But Inuyasha does hear the sweet warble of a <em> hototogisu</em>, and turning he finds his Kagome is gone. On the stump is a drab brown bird with a striated breast; with a mournful trill it flutters away. </p><p>The woods enclose. Inuyasha tears up the clearing, claws digging furrows into the stump, slashing at the goshinboku, calling for his Kagome. His voice cruelly echoes through the gaps between the closing trunks of his forest cage. The woods enclose; Inuyasha’s senses batter futilely against the decay of autumn’s final fruits; spores clog his nose; the sickly sweetness of the loquat is a torment. How does one find a summer bird in autumn? The ravens in the upper boughs cackle at his plight. </p><p>Inuyasha joins his rail-thin wildling cousins on their pilgrimage, heedless of the brambles and whip-sharp saplings that snag his garments as he follows their snuffling trails. The setting sun throws distended bars across his face, the distant horizon is lost as the gloaming rises. </p><p>Discordant notes of birdsong split the darkening air, piercing what feels like the very sharp center of his fear. Inuyasha pricks his ears and follows the flutter of a dozen wings. </p><p>He walks in the wood, each path seeming to converge on his singular focus: follow the birdsong. He reaches the center of the timbered labyrinth; at once he sees the timeless tableaux, posed as perfectly as an artist’s diorama.</p><p>She is flocked by birds, thronged in feathers, the force of their rustling wings sets the frail autumn leaves of the surrounding trees atremble. The rusty-winged <em> atori </em> perches on her shoulders, cock-headed magpies land on her knees, sparrows hop from palm to palm, a fat-beaked hawkfinch plucks a seed from uplifted fingers. Crows smudge the upper boughs in coal-black. There is even a water-loving heron, far from its marshy home, but Inuyasha’s sharp eyes spy no hototogisu. </p><p>She smiles and lays down her lily-white hand, shrugs off her avian cape, turns her eyes towards him; they are the color of blackcurrants pressed in the barrel, pith and pulp reduced wine-dark. There is a sudden intoxication—these are, he knows, the kind of eyes that men deep in their cups conjure to warm lonely nights, to distract from the grievous harm of their vices. </p><p>Inuyasha has his vices, too.</p><p><em> Have you seen a hototogisu</em>, he pleads, <em> my love, my Kagome, my little bird? </em></p><p><em> I have seen many birds</em>, Kikyo replies, <em> for they know me well and come freely to my hand. But alas, I have seen no lesser cuckoo. </em></p><p>She bids him come with her—<em>keep me company for a short while and we will search for your Kagome together. The birds know my home, too, so perhaps she will find you there</em>—she lives all alone in the heart of the wood. The roof of her cottage is thick and thatched in miscanthus, the <em> irori </em> sunken hearth is swept and tidy, an iron kettle dangles over the open flame. There is a small well full of pure spring water and a stack of firewood abutting the exterior wall. Fragrant bundles of herbs—lavender, and perilla, mint and mulberry—hang from the rafters; a mortar and pestle awaits on a small side table. The floor is polished to a shine. She only has one pair of inside sandals, and apologizes that Inuyasha must go without. </p><p>The wooden sliding doors are open to the inky blackness of night. Smoke trails out to wreath the moon, thin as a lady’s gossamer shawl. The rustle of feathers on wood haunts Inuyasha’s ears and he fears he’s gone insane until she pulls aside a <em> byōbu </em> standing screen to reveal a wall of wicker cages, each containing a bird. At the sight of her they are all atwitter, a clash of a hundred hundred lonely songs. She feeds each the choicest morsel by hand for they are, to her, such <em> dearest companions</em>. </p><p>A hundred hundred eyes glitter from the shadows. This first night, on his borrowed pallet, close to the banked fire, Inuyasha does not sleep. </p><p>She knows all of the wild plants of the forest and where to find them. Gathers burdock and taro, peels the corms carefully by hand before boiling them down to a toothsome morsel. Digs up the sweet potatoes with a well-worn hoe, cooks them in the coals till their purple skin is blistered black and their golden insides are buttery soft. Clay jars in the shed hold a bounty of umber-hued miso, soy sauce thick as honey from the hive. Come winter, she says, she’ll dig a small <em> yukimuro </em>to bury carrots and cabbage in the snow that piles up against the eaves. The land provides everything she needs.</p><p>She is an excellent host. Tender and solicitous, Inuyasha could not want for anything. She weaves him a pair of <em> zori </em> to size, spending a sheet of precious paper to trace the outline of his feet with her finger coated in charcoal from the hearth. The ghosting of her finger around his delicate soles makes him shiver. She heats water for his bath, stitches a <em> hanten </em>jacket of quilted cotton to ward off the evening chill.</p><p>Each day Inuyasha asks, when she returns from her forage, <em> have you seen a hototogisu</em>, <em> my love, my Kagome, my little bird? </em> Each day she replies, <em> not yet, I have seen no summer bird</em>.</p><p>He vows he will go off himself, not return until he has scoured each inch of the unforgiving wood, but the path loops and weaves and each evening he finds himself at Kikyo’s hut, drawn to the glow of her hearth as readily as a moth to flame. His daily range contracts and contracts again and he always returns before the night finishes laying her cloak of stars over the dome of the sky. </p><p>Sleep comes easier with time.</p><p><em> Won’t you skin this brace of rabbits? </em> She watches as he takes one pointed claw and makes a small incision at the base of the drooping neck, a single bead of blood welling grotesquely to the surface, a punctuation of death. He pulls with both hands to split the skin in two, easy as a ripe peach, twisting to free it from the cling of ligament and muscle. She urges him to lick the blood from beneath his claws, watches with a small, secret smile as the tang of copper and salt fizzes on his tongue, as if he’s ingested the very life force of the beast. He feels drunk, and when Kikyo takes the now-skinned rabbit into her hand, the stain of blood on her eggshell skin leaves the lacey impression of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoris_(plant)"> spider lily </a>on her palm. </p><p>That evening there’s rabbit stew, the fresh meat a barely imaginable luxury. Kikyo unearths a clay vessel of <em> shōchū </em>distilled from last year’s potato crop; she’s been saving it for a special occasion. She pours him a drought, practiced hands steady, graceful as a priestess in the midst of a ritual. They clink glasses, he sips, a nutty smokiness spreads through his mouth, a flame stoked in his belly. Kikyo’s eyes glint like the light on a beetle’s iridescent wing, Inuyasha is mesmerized by their slow blink. He staggers to bed. </p><p>
  <em> Have you seen a hototogisu? Have you seen a hototogisu? Have you? You?  </em>
</p><p>He wakes to the tender bruising of his lips. Blinks sleep from his eyes and there is Kikyo, hair spilling in an inky curtain. She guides one leaden claw to the tie at the hollow of her neck? <em> Won’t you skin a rabbit? </em>she murmurs against his pulse, dragging his hand down to sever so many tender threads. Now she is before him in the moonlight; he is blinded by the unblemished cream of her skin. A hundred hundred bird-bright eyes, caught in the glow, form a wall of stars behind her.</p><p>
  <em> My Kagome, my little bird? </em>
</p><p>She shows Inuyasha how to please her. He folds himself into the wave of her desire, lets her guide his hand down her skin; unwitting, his claws leave thin red trails, a transient cage of his own on her body, in their wake. </p><p>He parts her with two fingers; she convulses wantonly above him. His name bursts from her lips as she finds her pleasure. He knows he should stop, the tainted allure of his own desire in the twist of his hips is a leaden weight on his heart. She bends down for a kiss, but he manages to turn aside and Kikyo only brushes his cheek. Her lips are blood red where she worried them between neat little teeth; it burns where she touches him, like a brand. Untrue.</p><p>When it is over, Inuyasha rolls aside. He hears the rustle of her garment as she dresses, how the cloth slides over skin and sinew and he is ashamed. He dreams that night—has it been so long, since he dreamed?—of Kagome crying alone in the wood. No matter how he calls for her, she sits on a stump and calls for <em> her Inuyasha </em> and cries and cries until her tears fill the clearing and the last thing he tastes is salt.</p><p>That morning heralds the first true frost. Overnight, an icy film has kissed each leaf and blade, they glitter like a thousand thousand knives in the dawn. The well has frozen over: Inuyasha must break the crust of ice to fetch enough water for Kikyo’s bath. </p><p>She washes her hair, it spills down her back in waves, like kelp dredged from the seafloor. Fanning it before the fire, it crackles as it dries; Inuyasha kneels behind her with a precious bottle of camellia oil, combing it through the ropelike tresses until they once again gleam like lacquer in the flickering half-light. </p><p>When she comes to him in the night, she brings that subtle perfume with her. The whites of her eyes appear larger in the gloom. Her bruising kisses pepper his neck and chest, though always Inuyasha avoids her lips. His subsequent dreams are always filled with Kagome’s sobs. When he wakes, he feels like a rotten fruit, wormy and mealy to the core. Spoiled, now that someone else has taken a bite.</p><p>Mornings are silent, now, the birds too cold to sing. They fluff up in their cages, cheeping disconsolately as their threadbare enclosures sway with each frigid breeze. It’s even leaner pickings for those out in the woods, and once a day Kikyo goes to the clearing where Inuyasha first saw her and scatters nuts and seeds from her stores. The birds fight over this proverbial mana, bully-body crows mauling every finch and sparrow that dares approach. </p><p><em> Have you seen a hototogisu</em>, <em> my love, my Kagome, my little bird? </em></p><p>He takes to walking the same paths in the forest for hours, wears a track through the snow like a deer. How does one find a summer bird in winter?</p><p><em> You could stay with me</em>, she says over dinner, pressing the last <em> hoshigaki </em> to his lips; he whines at the dried persimmon’s burst of golden sweetness, curls his tongue to lick the last of it from the pads of her fingers. <em> You could stay with me</em>, she says in the dark, breath hot on the back of his neck. <em> You could stay with me</em>, she says at high noon, sun glinting off the dusting of snow on the rounds of her shoulders, <em> for you are my dearest companion</em>. </p><p>Inuyasha realizes what she is trying to do and shakes with a terrible fear. She means to steal him away, entice him a cage of home and hearth, weave a net of all his wants and never let him go. Oh! What a delicate trap of domesticity! What cloying vines of placid acceptance! Already his shoes by the entrance, his clothes in the chest, his futon pressed against hers, cinching the drawstrings of an accidental life. He allows himself one waking dream, of Kagome and Kikyo, the three of them planting seeds in the damp spring loam, harvesting the buckwheat in the fall, each pressing the best of the salty-sour pickles between the other’s parted lips. Ah, if!</p><p>This night, Inuyasha dreams not of Kagome but of a flower, a single blood-red spider lily blooming in the snow, a pearlescent purple jewel nestled in its arched petals. When he plucks it, a mirage of Kagome shimmers before him, flickering between bird and woman.</p><p>He leaves early, before the dawn, taking not the woven shoes nor the warm jacket nor any of the bounty Kikyo still has banked against winter’s ambivalent cruelty. He takes nought but himself, stumbles heedless and headlong into the elements. </p><p>Fingers numb, freeze, blacken at the tips. His claws feel brittle enough to snap. Snow-blind, Inuyasha staggers onward at the mercy of the forest and the strength of his own demonic constitution. Branches crack under the weight of ice and snow, sharp and sudden as breaking bone. </p><p>A cold cave, a restless sleep. Inuyasha burns, cannot shake the cravings for her—whose?—phantom touches, the ghost of breath on his nape, the way she cries out when he twists hanks of her hair in each hand and tugs. He opens his eyes to the blackness, and he swears dark eyes gaze back.  </p><p>
  <em> Have you seen?  </em>
</p><p>A return to savagery. On day three, he plunges his claws into an unwary vole. Red soaks the snow, the corpse steams in his hand. He consumes it raw and whole, sucking blood from each finger with ravenous slurps. Quick-witted birds flee from his reaper’s visage; they have better memories than people. </p><p>He stumbles across the hell flower on day nine, the red against white like an untouched miko. At its center gleams the glowing purple jewel from his dreams; it pulses in time to the beat of his own heart. In his half-crazed state Inuyasha almost crushes it in his palm, halted only by some subconscious saving grace. Instead he neatly snips it near the root, cradles the unearthly bloom to his chest as he stumbles back through snow drifts that reach up to his thighs. </p><p>When he slips, Inuyasha doesn’t break his fall for fear of crushing his precious burden. His knees buckle and crack against a snow-covered rock; now they, too, weep blood from a spider’s web of cuts. They will scar, he knows, and pretends the white lines that remain will be permanent flowers of his own to bear, a white lily to the red. </p><p>At once there is a radical shifting, he wakes from a fever dream to find the woods again familiar. Kikyo’s bird-haunted solitude just over the next ridge. </p><p>He follows the path; it snakes before him toward an inevitable end. And all at once he sees the thatched-roof cabin, the shed, the mounded rows of her little tilled garden, bleached and surreal as a half-forgotten dream.</p><p>At the sound of his approach, Kikyo throws herself at his feet, weeping over the feet he can no longer feel, the crust of blood on his knees, his snow-burned, weather-worn skin. <em> I will make salves</em>, she says. She speaks as one does to a battered dog, unsure if it will lick or snap the proffered hand. <em> I will make you warm, heal your wounds</em>. </p><p>She herds him inside, but cannot get him to toss aside the lily. But now the rattling wall of birds is aglow, from the breast of each pitiable beast shines a pure white light. Inuyasha touches the flower to the nearest shivering soul. There is an unholy din, the clamor of a hundred hundred stifled voices, and the form of the bird before him trembles and melts, an oozy pulp of feathers and hollow bones. </p><p>A pale-skinned youth blinks dazed brown eyes up at Inuyasha, lanky limbs in sprawl, not bothering to hide his modesty. </p><p>Again and again he gestures with his magic flower, the painstakingly polished floor is soon awash in feather and filth, discarded husks of beak and claw. Dozens of dull-eyed, loose-limbed forms entwine where they fall; how do you remember how to be human once your wings are clipped?</p><p>
  <em> My Kagome?  </em>
</p><p>She is not here. Neither the russet-breasted <em> atori </em> nor the clever magpie nor the hawkfinch nor any of the somber-hued sparrows. </p><p>
  <em> My little bird? </em>
</p><p>Inuyasha turns, advances, hell-flower brandished like a burning <em> vajra </em> sword, Fudo Myo-o incarnate.</p><p><em> Have you seen a hototogisu</em>, <em> my love, my Kagome, my little bird? </em></p><p>The next time she sleeps, in her house of empty cages, he vows he will take two handfuls of her camellia-slick hair and wrap it twice around her bone-white neck, tenderly kiss each eyelid just to feel her eyelashes thrash butterfly soft against his cheek. He will sever each strand from her head with his claw as if plucking the strings of a <em> shamisen </em>; he will delight in burning them in the hearth. He will let the house fall silent as the grave.</p><p>From a hidden cupboard, shut away from the light and the breeze, Kikyo proffers in trembling hands a spartan wooden cage, a sacrifice to a vengeful deity. A touch, a flash, a hair-raising scream and there she is: His love, his Kagome; summer slipped free from its cage calling <em> Inuyasha, Inuyasha, my Inuyasha</em>.</p>
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